Free INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice by David Feige Page A

candles the Dominicans love, lit for peace or serenity or safe travels --faded decals of second-tier saints curling off the glass as they flickered down to nothingness.
     
           The Oritz Funeral Home on Soundview Avenue is a dingy building crammed amid the jumble and decay of the neighborhood. Ortiz does a brisk and unusually young business --ODs and murder victims, slain gangsters and kids caught in the cross fire. The expertise helped: I’d never seen Bemo looking so peaceful as he did lying in the casket in his prom-style tux, his small, twitchy face smoothed to a consistent, if waxy, pallor, his hands crossed demurely over his chest. The brutal fury of the bullets --their entry into and exit from his body --was nowhere in sight.
     
           I spoke at Bemo’s funeral, as I had so many times in court, my brief remarks sandwiched amid the testimonials of family and friends, former drug addicts, and recent crime partners, all celebrating a life --regularly violent, certainly criminal, and often tragic --led entirely within the confines of the projects.
     
           The cops, keeping a respectful distance, watched the comings and goings closely, shooting me a quizzical look when I stopped near the shrine for a moment of reflection. Two reporters were circling, looking to understand the strange phenomenon of a beloved neighborhood thief. Their questions betrayed an elemental confusion, the same one that pervades the criminal justice system --how can a criminal actually be good? This is a question that surfaces almost every time I talk about my work.
     
           “He’s a thief!” my friend Diana said to me once, her blond curls bouncing slightly. “Doesn’t that creep you out just a little bit?” We were standing in a crowded SoHo bar in the middle of an otherwise restrained birthday celebration. I was about halfway through my third glass of overpriced, mediocre Cabernet when I’d mentioned Bemo.
     
           “I mean, how can you actually like them?” she persisted. “They’re people, Di,” I replied, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time why being a lawyer for the poor somehow anointed me ambassador for the despised. “They have lives and wives and loves just as poignant and real and compelling as yours.”
     
           “Well, I don’t go around robbing people,” she sniffed as I managed a wan smile and changed the subject.
     
           For some reason when it comes to my indigent ghetto clients, it becomes easy to forget that people, including those who break the law, are complicated and often charming. That they too contain multitudes. Oddly, no one has trouble understanding the humanity of white crooks. We mythologize them all the time --Bonnie and Clyde, John Gotti, Carolyn Warmus --all are complex people we find ways to relate to and even admire. At the movies we cheer for Butch and Sundance, Scarface , or the Ocean’s Eleven crew. The fact that John Gotti was a ruthless killer who wreaked havoc on far more lives than any of my clients ever touched never eclipses the public memory of him as big, handsome, and defiant. People loved Gotti’s resistance to governmental authority. But put a black face on Gotti and no matter how dapper a don he is, the press, the prosecutors, and the public only read menace. I’ve often represented people as “big,” “handsome,” and “defiant” as John Gotti, yet when I invoke the humanity of these faceless robbers and killers, it sends most listeners from the land of mere confusion to that of utter incomprehension. To this day, I wrestle with where this understanding goes off the rails. Fundamentalist Christians constantly speak passionately about seeing the possibility of redemption in everyone, and no one bats an eye. But make this same point in the secular context of the criminal justice system, and rather than praiseworthy piety it is heard as liberal gibberish.
     
     
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           As I pull up